After updating to the Intel Aero v1.6 O/S (and also v1.6.1), I've noticed distortion in the 640x480 greyscale optical flow camera on the right-hand side (about 25% of the image area):

I don't recall seeing this distortion when I was using the Intel v1.3.1 O/S. I suspect the difference may be the change in internal frame rate since I believe v1.6 bumped it up to 75 Hz. However, given that we are applying optical flow algorithms, this distortion is a bit of a problem. We have noticed this issue on more than one unit. Is this a known issue? Will there be a fix coming?

Rather than have you try to replicate my Video For Linux 2 application, I thought it would be easier if I just used the Camera Streaming Daemon provided by Intel with QGroundControl. Here is the video output streaming from rtsp://mydrone.local:8554/bottom:

As you can see the distortion is still there, so it is independent of V4L2 or csd, but is something fundamental to the camera or interface. The Intel Aero Compute board is mounted in the Intel RTF Drone and is connected to all three cameras on the drone.

Can you provide me the output of get_aero_version.py? You mentioned you have a second drone, do you see the same distortion on the second drone? Take a look at the screenshot from my QGroundControl video feed, I did not see any distortion on mine. I am running the following version:

I didn't include the FPGA_VERSION or AeroFC firmware version because we don't use the AeroFC and we have our own custom FPGA. As for the other drone, we have two more sets of cameras but we can't get them working at all so far. Not sure why.

I am checking with the engineering team about the distortion on the camera. The other cameras that you are having issue getting them to work, are you using them on Aero with v1.6.1? The streams should be running out of box.

We've tried the other cameras with an earlier version of the O/S with V4L2. We are waiting for a new set of cameras which we have ordered and we will try with a brand new Intel Aero Compute board with the latest O/S.

Can you please provide me additional pictures/information for engineering?

We would like to obtain pictures of your test configuration, how the camera is mounted on the Aero RTF and how it is orientated in relation to the target image. If you can also send over a close up of the VGA camera, both cameras side by side if possible. Have you also tried to take photos in various image resolutions or other tunable settings?

We are expected to get new cameras in the next couple of days, so I will try those first. We are suspecting that the issue may be connector fatigue as the cameras have been moved around in the prototyping stage and we investigated the rating on the camera connectors on the Intel board and they appear to be rated for only 30-50 plug/unplug cycles.

We received two new camera sets and have tried them out with v1.3.1 and v1.6.1 of the Intel O/S and they work fine without any distortion on both versions of the operating system. We will be getting more sets to try but at the moment it is looking as if the problem was with our other cameras or connectors. My suspicion is that the distortion was due to connector fatigue because in the prototyping stage we were moving cameras between systems. We were not doing this frequently and in all but one case the connector looked fine visually, but that is the only potential explanation I have at the moment.